Honeymoon Over For Google?

scubacuda writes "Business Week has an article on some of the challenges Google faces as it gains popularity. For a while, things were looking good: unobtrusive ads, a hardware search appliance, and the fact that 'google' has become a verb (like xerox, kleenex, hoover, etc.). Now, Yahoo! has dropped the 'exclusive' part of its contract, Overture won a series of key contracts, Verity has announced a deal to purchase Inktomi's assets, and Y! announced it was buying Inktomi's web-search business. And other engines such as WiseNut, Teoma, and FAST now mimic Google's 'popularity placement technology.'"

Comments

Yeah, but they still get the hits

[The_K4]

They may start to see more channenges, but by and large people will still "google" things. People who always use google will as long as they remain a great search engine...if they start letting the results slip, then all bets are off.

google, wonderful

[scovetta]

Google has IMHO the best search-engine technology around. However, the time is coming for more intelligent engines--content based searching is around the corner, and I'm sure that development is being done at Google. I want to search for pictures by content (not by filename). I want a larger set of query commands (NEAR, etc). Kartoo has an intuitive (and addicting) interface, and the ties it generates are... cool.
I don't think google losing some contracts will mean very much. Anyone can piggy back off of them, and if they can make a better product, more power to them, but I think google is around to stay.
Any word on an IPO?

What I'd like to know

[TerryAtWork]

Is whatever happened to Alta Vista. Remember when they ruled the search engine universe?

I first heard of Google when I got a semi-hysterical letter from Assembler God Steve Gibson raving about it.

I didn't abandon AV until after their second edition of Personal Alta Vista insisted on using my browser (where the first edition used a little window) and engendered a whole bunch of 505 errors and became useless.

They HAD to add a layer of complexity... :-(

So whatever DID happen to Alta Vista?

Re:What I'd like to know

[Roosey]

There's an article that describes its demise pretty well here.

It tried to be a "portal site," only it wasn't a very good one at all. Botched implementation, a cluttered site and a search engine left unimproved sent a lot of users fleeing over time.

I guess they learned their lesson, albeit too late. If you look at their site now as compared to their site in 2000 you can see a significant difference.

Re:Changes nothing

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I for one hope that google lasts - I would even pay a small amount if it would help keep them going"

Gotta wonder what it would take to dethrone Google, thouogh.

Personally, I think their image search is great. If they'd beef that up a bit, I'd be seriously considering a subscription not unlike the kind Slashdot has. $5 for 1,000 image searches or something like that. The catch is that it'd have to be better than the one today. Perhaps if they had a rewards system where you could earn searches by taking pics around the web and logging meta-data for them or something.

PageRank isn't the only thing Google uses...

[sgtsanity]

Google uses (at the last count I've seen) over 50 different factors in deciding what ranking a website should get on a certain search term. Part of their monthly rankings dance is rebalancing the importance of these factors to try to maintain the integrity of the results. Searchking's earlier lawsuit was over the effects of one earlier dance. PageRank is only the most visible of the components deciding a page's score, due to it's ingeniousness and to it being the only quantitative data released about the evaluation process (because of the google toolbar).

Also, don't forget about google's wildly successful Pigeon rank system.

Google helps decide popularity (such as porn)...

[$$$$$exyGal]

Google is even used to see what scripting language is being used most by the porn industry.

There are tons of "races" like that on the Internet. Google gets to decide the winners. Yes, it is just silly fun, but the point is that the masses accept google as the definitive source.

--naked

Re:Changes nothing

[On Lawn]

I think their News search is downright revolutionary. Not only do I get news categorized by what people really want to see but I can instantly check out viewpoints from all sides at the same time.

Its now my primary news source.

Re:Wisenut?

[Sandman1971]

But I'm saddened to see yet another Slashdotter using Windows NT 5.1. Surely you can tear yourselves away from the soft, familiar womb that is Windows.... Try it, give it a go, be adventurous. You might never leave the town your were born in, but do something crazy, wild, exciting in your life....

Ya know, I'm kinda getting sick of always seeing this on slashdot.

So I happen to be surfing on my windows box. Yippee! My linux boxes I mostly use as servers (web/mail/firewall),coding and work (I'm a sysadmin in a mostly Sun shop) because that's what they're best at (not to mention one is a P200 that I don't even dare launch X on). I use my windows box to do net stuff (cuz face it, alot of browser plugins and such arent available on windows), gaming and graphics work. I'm thinking of even getting a Mac to do my graphics work instead of doing it on Windows.

Linux is good for some things, Windows for others and Macs for other things. I use whatever platform is best for what I want to do. No OS is the be all and end all of operating systems. They all have their different strengths and weaknesses. So be adventurous, open your mind, don't be narrowminded.

Windows user since 1990
Unix user since 1991 (AIX)
Linux user since 1993-94
Solaris user since 1998
and possible future Mac user

Re:Google Easily Explained

[Anonymous Hack]

3. Google loads quickly and does not attempt to invasively control your machine with javascript or other methods.

This is not true, as many Canadian users have known for a while and many Australian users such as myself have just discovered. Google now redirects the front page (www.google.com) to a country-specific front page based on your IP address. Sure, it's a nice service to have local information available (the paid advertisements down the side change to local advertisements, amongst other things), but it really sucks that you're forced to use it. Most users don't know to change their bookmark to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ to return to the "real" Google, so they're stuck with it. This was the number one reason why i changed from Alta Vista to Google in the first place, and now i'm really wondering whether i should stick with it. raging.com is Alta Vista's minimal search, and it's just as fast and sleek as google, AND it doesn't assume just because you come from 203.x.x.whatever you're automatically interested in Australian content.

Re:Cease and Desist letter...

[smack_attack]

Changing the wording of their logo like that makes it appear that you are trying to capture misspelled traffic for your own benefit. I fail to see how it was in any way a parody aside from the changing of the letters and hawking your links and providing an interface to their engine that can easily be construed as "intentionally confusing" to users.

So what?

[almightyjustin]

This seems to me to be a non-issue. So it gives you an Australian version of Google. So what? I went to www.google.com.au, it looks the same as regular Google, by default it still searches the entire Internet.... The only thing that seems to be different is the *additional* option to search only Aussie sites. The ads looked the same too (and if you get ads for services you could actually purchase locally, what's the downside?). I don't get what the problem is. In fact, it's probably better because you wouldn't get DMCA removals and such.